- [Narrator] Playful droids (droid squeaking), electromagnetic eyes, and (lightsaber whirring). Yeah, that's real. - Pretty cool. - [Narrator] These inventions represent Disney's most experimental technologies made here at its Research and Development lab. - It's more like Area 51. And we've done a really good job of making sure that people don't understand what's happening inside of this building. - [Narrator] Inventors here build creations that are crucial to drawing guests to Disney's parks, the centerpiece of the company's most profitable unit. Disney is facing increasing competition from rivals like Universal. And Lanny Smoot, the guy behind that lightsaber, is Disney's most decorated inventor. - If I see something in the real world that is kind of quirky, maybe an illusion, and I can build a whole attraction out of that (bell clanging).

- [Narrator] With Disney about to embark on a major expansion of its theme park business, and with competition in the industry intensifying. - So, any direction. - [Narrator] The company gave The Journal a behind-the-scenes look at the tech that could make its next attraction. (fast-paced techno music) - This is my lab. I keep an inventory of the things that I need to do, prototypes that come about quickly, because an idea I think is fleeting. If you don't capture it and don't bring it out of your mind into the physical world, you can sometimes lose it. And I wanna be fast. - [Narrator] Smoot is Disney's leader in patents. He's named on more than 70 with the company and more than a hundred throughout his career. - This is the electromagnetic eye. The idea for it is to replace a lot of the mechanisms that would be inside of a robotic head.

We call those the animatronics. This, of course, is a much
bigger version of it. There are magnets at the
top, bottom, left, and right of the inner eye. And these coils create a magnetic field that move the eye left and
right, and up and down. - [Narrator] In his 25
plus years at Disney, he helped create those eyeballs seen here in the chameleon Pascal. The floating head of Madame Leota inside the haunted mansion. - Awaken the spirits. - [Narrator] The water harps at EPCOT. (soft string music) And an X-Ray flashlight used
to teach fire safety with tech. But that's not the focus. - Story is king here. If you have technology, but it doesn't fit into a bigger picture, which is the story of Star Wars or the story of one of our
characters, it's of no use. (lightsaber whirring)

- [Narrator] Some of those ideas take seemingly impossible
things from the screen, a computer-generated
lightsaber, for instance, and to make them real. Can someone get the lights? I'd like to show off my Jedi powers. (lightsaber whirring) We have to make something
that a guest can wield, or that they can see on the stage, and it has to look just
like it does in the movies. (lightsaber whirring) - [Narrator] This is what Smoot
calls the Hero Lightsaber, the most realistic one
Disney has ever come up with. It was used in performances at the company's immersive Star Wars Hotel before it closed in 2023. The key issue here was to have something that was both retractable, but this had the same
diameter along its blade, and it's really hard to do. - [Narrator] According to the patent, a motor in the hilt activates

two long plastic semi-cylinders, which come together and extend, making the blade, which is then lit by a flexible strip of LEDs. This is just one of the lightsabers that Smoot has worked on. Another was used in displays. - So, I have control of what we call the penumbra. The light that is sort of ephemerally attached to the saber. - [Narrator] He's also helped develop technology for two more, one of which guests used in real-life lightsaber training. - I have a sort of a cottage industry in lightsabers. Each of those inventions is actually a completely technically different thing. The pressure is greater when a guest already is familiar with what this thing should be, and the challenge is to deliver on that belief. - [Narrator] Getting the magic right is the kind of thing that can draw in new guests and turn them into repeat customers, which Disney needs.

Its rival Universal plans
to open a major expansion to its Florida theme park in 2025. Something Disney hasn't
done there since 2019. And fans are clamoring
for new experiences. - Walt Disney Imagineering is in service of making the parks attractive. And if you can make something more fun, more amazing, more
surprising, more people come, and that's part of our business. To make sure we have happy people and a lot of happy people in our parks. - [Narrator] One recent
edition was these BDX droids for Star Wars Land. (droid beeping) (horn honking) But recreating the familiar
isn't all Imagineering does. Sometimes Smoot's job is creating things no one has seen before, like the holotile. - It's the world's first
and only multi-directional, modular, multi-person holotile floor, which is a sort of an
omni-directional treadmill

for multiple people. (soft chiming) - [Narrator] Here's how it works. The floor is made up of tiles
of small articulating discs that spin and tilt to undo walking or push items in any direction. In order for the floor
to know where I am walking and to counteract my motion, we use lidar. Beams of light or circles of light are emitted from these devices, and the reflected time of flight of light lets them know where my
feet are on the floor. And knowing where my feet are
and the strides I'm taking, we can use software to control the floor to undo my forward motion
or my sideways motion. - [Narrator] Smoot says holotile is one of his longest projects. He started on it almost seven years ago. I was inspired, I'm gonna
go a little off brand, off the Disney brand to Star Trek, where they have a thing called a holodeck.

(doors buzzing) And that allows people to walk around in a place that is physically small, but they can walk forever
as anywhere they want. - This woodland pattern
is quite popular, sir. - [Narrator] Disney hasn't
announced plans for holotile yet, but in the future, it could allow guests to harness the force. - [Lanny] Yeah, look at this. - [Narrator] Or make them feel like they're physically moving
through space while using VR. - [Lanny] Oh, wow. Okay. - The work that Lanny Smoot
has done on the holotile is an incredible contribution to both how we could potentially design new attractions in virtual
reality, in mixed reality, in order to leverage that
investment that we've made. - [Narrator] Smoot's inventions at Disney have even been awarded
outside of the company. - Tonight, we have the
privilege of celebrating Lanny.

whose work has taken us to
places we could only imagine. (audience applauding) - [Narrator] In May, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. - I must have been doing something right during my years at Disney. - [Narrator] Making him the
second person from Disney to receive the honor. The first, Walt himself. - It's a wonderful honor, but
it is also a responsibility to carry on the bringing of new people, many people who look like me, into the field of science and engineering. When I was a kid, I
didn't see Black engineers, almost till the time I was one, right? I grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn. It's not a wealthy area, I'll say that. And being able to be a
role model for folks again, that may not have believed
that you could go into a field, it's wonderful. - [Narrator] But Smoot's
induction doesn't mark an ending.

He's still tinkering. So, as I talk and my voice is louder or lower, I am making my little friend that's just a still image in eight places talk. I'm proud of the things that I've been able to do over my career that on the technical side are good technically and used. And on the fun side at the Walt Disney Company are technical and are used. So it's been a good, good time and I wanna keep going. (soft techno music)

Inside Disney’s ‘Area 51,’ Where Lightsabers and Other Tech Are Invented | WSJ

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